Successful online services can be difficult for service providers to maintain well. In particular, if online service providers do not anticipate customer growth by procuring and maintaining computing resources to handle growth, the online service may become sluggish, may improperly handle customer data, or may have to reject potential customers. For example, some of the successfully operating online financial services have 15 million users, 2.5 million active users, and consume 60 terabytes of financial data. While such online services experience growth in users and traffic, the growth can be sporadic and difficult to predict. Thus, if the service provider purchases excessive quantities of computing resources in preparation for growth, then the service provider reduces its profits while paying for cooling costs, power consumption, maintenance fees, and initial purchase fees for all of the hardware and software computing resources that are in standby until customer usage actually consumes the additional computing resources. On the other hand, if the service provider simply maintains enough resources to service the current amount of user traffic, the quality of the online service may be compromised by insufficient bandwidth, interruptions in service, improper management or loss of user data, and the like.
While cloud computing environments offer an expandable resource platform for online service providers to use to launch new online services, many existing online services have significant numbers of users and are hosted from traditional data centers. Because of the risks of extensive downtimes of online services, the risks of compromising user data to the cloud, and the risks of unknown de-bugging periods, established online services have been reluctant to move to cloud computing environments.
What is needed is a system and method for transferring the hosting of financial service to an elastic virtual computing environment (e.g., the cloud) from a hardware-based computing environment, without service interruption to the financial service, according to one embodiment.